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JWMarines wrote:
Cool, that's kind of what I was thinking.

Here's what I came up with.

So, I've used this guy before to make some custom shoulder pads with the Welsh dragon on them and they turned out quite well. You pay him for the design, you approve it, he makes it, and then you can order as many as you want from the site. It's not the cheapest way but the detail was spectacular. Go look through the store on the link below.

http://www.shapeways.com/designer/CustomMinis

There this one from Anvil Industry too.

http://www.anvilindustry.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&path=77_66&product_id=187

http://www.anvilindustry.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&path=77_66&product_id=187

Very interesting about the guy on Shapeway, has some nice skull helmets I like. A bit hard to see the shoulder pads though. Thanks for posting

Dax415 wrote:
Very interesting about the guy on Shapeway, has some nice skull helmets I like. A bit hard to see the shoulder pads though. Thanks for posting

Here's a close up of the ones I commissioned and ordered. They are clear plastic so I inked this particular one to bring out the fine detail. Only fault I can find with this is that they are a bit shallower than your standard GW shoulder pads so some filing was done on the arm before attaching.

Worth the expense, no doubt.

Cant wait for updates

Sorry for the lack of updates, here's what's been going on.

I ran out of silicone to make molds about the same time I had a bunch of bills come through, so I had to wait a week before ordering resupply. Then went away for a weekend. Then had to wait for resupply. When that arrived, I was headed out of town for a week. All this insanity should be clear by next week when I'm back and I can hopefully work on the first 5 head sprue. With this resin I really should build a vacuum chamber, so I might be out hunting down a working vacuum motor at thrift stores.

I have a mess of cast helmets to work with. 5 of them I have nicely cleaned up and they are ready for some slight customization before I can hopefully make a useful sprue mold of them. I also bitz orderd a bunch of ravenwing special helmets to use as idea inspiration. There's even one that has modular wings and notches in the helmet where they go. While I hate the wing design and the final look that the GW helmet has, the fact that it's out there makes it pretty clear to me that a modular design will work for this if I can figure out how to not make it look dumb as well as ensure that it's easy to assemble. Sculpting wing variants might even be easier if I don't have to do it on a helmet.

I'll be back in a couple days and should be able to start back in on this soon.

I poured the first side of the 5 head mold a few hours ago. I'm not sure if it will be ready to pour the second side tonight or not. I'm using oomoo 30, which is a 6 hour de-mold, so probably not tonight. Once it's done I will probably try a few castings to work on the vents a bit. I picked up an old Dirt Devil hand-held vac at the thrift store yesterday. I'm going to try to rip it apart and attach the suction motor to the lid of a Rubbermaid container with nice a nice hard plastic base. Hopefully it will turn out into a decent enough vacuum chamber... We'll see!

Cool hope it works

Second mold + baby powder + angled resin pour = success!

I tried to get too fancy with the first mold and have it with a sprue bit that kind of encircled all of them. That didn't work for $@#%. So, the second mold is just the basic multi-head sprue-type that you see coming out of indi mini shops.

Anyway, there's a fair amount of flash and some bubbles, but it's the easy kind of flash and bubbles in mostly inconsequential places.


Here's the results! Not perfect, but hey, I'm pretty new to this.
The mold:



The Sprue:




Cheers!

Yes Eagle helmets!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just curious how did you make five heads on the sprue? did you cast the mold from copied pieces or did you make 5 original sculpts then casted them?

I made a mold of the original sculpt and then set about making about 20 casts of that. That mold wasn't the greatest, so I had to fill some spots and resculpt some - mostly in the wings. But I took the best 4 and cleaned, filed, filled, flattened the eyes to lenses, and touxpched up a few spots. So the final sprue, each head was touched up separately so there is a touch of variation in the beaks, feather crests, eyes and beak vents.


If anyone is interested in a sprue or two of the first mold PM me and we can work something out.

I also just began working on the modular wings design. I press molded the wings from the existing helmet to keep a set nice and consistent. And I've carved the inset slots into a helmet where the wings will attach. Next is to work on getting the wing pieces to fit the helmet and slot.

this is great....ill pm later on. looking forward to getting these

You got PM! Anyone else interested in these?

Yeah Dax, they're going international! I REALLY hope I can make progress on the modular design this week. But I also really would like to paint up an assault marine to see it for myself...decisions decisions...

Nicely done JWMarines, they could probably be used for a Thousand Sons army too. They remind me somewhat of the Horus Guard helmets from the Stargate SG1 tv series.

cadbren wrote:
Nicely done JWMarines, they could probably be used for a Thousand Sons army too. They remind me somewhat of the Horus Guard helmets from the Stargate SG1 tv series.

Thanks Cabren! Now that I look at them again, they definitely do look a bit similar to the Horus heads... not intentional, but kinda cool.

Well gents, here's one all painted up on my ebay recovery assault marine for my 2nd Company of Doom Eagles.




Here's what my normal headed assault marines look like:


And here you can see the slight issue with the wing crests getting a bit too close to the jump pack for easy positioning:



While it took me forever to find enough time to work on this project on and off. Dax (OP) should have helmets in hand today or tomorrow. I hope they work for you and you enjoy them man.